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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Boy Eating the Bird's Food (2012)

Boy Eating the Bird's Food (2012)

Director:Ektoras Lygizos Country: GreeceRuntime:80 min

Boy Eating the Bird’s Food, inspired by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger, tells the story of Yorgos (Yiannis Papadopoulos) a twenty-two year old living an isolated life in modern day Athens and on the brink of poverty and starvation. He is estranged from his family and only really has one true friend – his beloved pet canary. Quite like a bird himself, Yorgos has a beautiful singing voice and occasionally shares his canary’s birdseed.

The whole film is an unashamed metaphor for the mood of the people of modern day Greece. A sense of frustration reverberates throughout the film stemming from the fact that Yorgos’ passion and talents are being stifled due to a lack of financial independence. This escalates into the protagonist resorting to more and more desperate measures to keep himself alive and to retain some level of sanity and self-worth.

Employing the use of shaky cam and extreme close up shots, the film is uncomfortably intimate, obsessive and even intrusive into Yorgos’ everyday life. Thus we can’t help but sympathise with this character, having seen him at his most private and vulnerable. Lygizos describes using a small camera from early on in the rehearsal process so that Papadopoulos could become “used to me being his ‘co-player’ – not a co-star, not another actor, but instead his subtle shadow.”

Yorgos’ is deliberately denied a social context or background history in order to convey the message that his story is indeed a ubiquitous one in Greece and the emphasis remains on the obvious metaphor. Greece’s abandonment by Germany is symbolically present within the classical German language piece Yorgos chooses to sing for an audition early in the film. It is no mere coincidence that Yorgos doesn’t understand the lyrics and furthermore, that he fails the audition.

Boy Eating the Bird’s Food is a powerful, uncomfortably honest and truly devastating portrayal of a young man struggling not only to feed and house himself, but also clutching onto a fading sense of identity, masculinity and self-worth. A brave performance from Papadopoulos in Lygizos’ accomplished debut feature film; well deserving of all the critical acclaim it will undoubtedly receive on the festival circuit and beyond.